Willamette Week Online: A Mouthful of Air by Amy Koppelman (MacAdam/Cage, 212 pages, $23) Top among the latest crop is Amy Koppelman's dark, moving look at femininity and depression, A Mouthful of Air. Written with a dreamlike intensity, the book chronicles the life of fragile new wife and mother Julie Davis in the months following her release from a psychiatric hospital after attempting suicide.

Caught in a storm of postpartum emotions, Julie finds herself in a world different from the one her domineering mother had prepared her for. Where are the promised successful husband, handsome children, fashionable friends and thin body? But her mother's world is also shattering. Julie's father has just left home for a younger woman--spinning her mother into a frenzy of plastic surgeries and endless home-movie sessions. Only Zoloft soothes Julie's depression, an affliction "like asthma--it can happen anytime, and it's beyond her control."

It's a bad time for losing control. She and Ethan, her compassionate but emotionally simple husband, discover they had conceived a second child the night before her suicide attempt. Harried by demons of self-loathing and damaged by her mother's lifetime of prep work, finding identity within her new roles of mother and wife becomes a heartbreaking struggle: She's unequipped to define herself apart from her family and shallow, dinner-party friendships. Always, the specter of sadness is never far away.

Koppelman is unwaveringly honest and graceful in her storytelling. Her journey into Julie's tormented psyche paints a graphic portrait of a mind pinioned between regret and anxiety, revealing the dark corners of motherhood and marriage in the manner of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper a century ago.

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